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Journalism of Courage
Barack Obama slowly walked up the steps of his campaign plane here on Friday evening, his suit coat slung over his shoulder, as he concluded his one-day visit home to Hawaii.
From touch-down on Thursday to take off on Friday, Obama spent nearly 22 hours on the ground in Honolulu visiting his ailing grandmother, Madelyn Dunham. He did not say how Mrs Dunham was feeling and campaign aides did not disclose her condition, but he believes this could be his last time seeing her. He had expressed worry in interviews that she may not live until Election Day, and explained that he suspended his campaign schedule to see her, and recalled how he had not been able to get to his mother’s bedside before she died. His grandmother’s 86th birthday is on Sunday.
During his brief visit here, he spent about seven hours with his grandmother during three separate trips to the apartment where she has lived for about four decades. A small group of reporters accompanied Obama to the Punahou Circle Apartments, but they waited outside as he visited his grandmother.
He did not speak to reporters on his trip and was filmed by camera crews only once, as he took a solitary walk along Young Street in his old neighbourhood. His visit dominated Hawaii television news and newspapers.
After an overnight flight, he is scheduled to appear at three rallies on Saturday, the first of which is in Reno, Nevada, followed by one in Las Vegas and an evening event in Albuquerque.
For the last 21 months, Mrs Dunham has followed the odyssey of Obama’s presidential campaign like a spectator on a faraway balcony. She underwent a corneal transplant to see him on television. She reluctantly agreed to film a political advertisement when he urgently needed to reassure voters about his distinctive American roots. She told him during one of their frequent telephone conversations that it might not hurt if he smiled a bit more.
But on Friday, at the Punahou Circle Apartments, a place of Obama’s childhood, she lay gravely ill. For weeks, Obama has tracked her condition. When she was released from the hospital last week after surgery to repair a broken hip, he received word that he should not wait until after the election to make what he believes a final visit.
Obama has reached the closing days of his run for the White House without embarking on a formal biographical tour. In a candidacy built on biography, his advisers believed that substance, as well as an overseas trip in July, was a wiser course. But a biographical tour of sorts has unfolded around him here on the one-day visit to see the woman who was a guiding force in his life and who played a supporting role in his candidacy, from the Iowa caucuses to his marquee speech on race in Philadelphia to his general-election effort to win over voters in red states.
“One of the things I wanted to make sure of is that I had a chance to sit down with her and talk to her,” Obama said on the ABC News. “She’s still alert and she’s still got all her faculties, and I want to make sure that — that I don’t miss that opportunity right now.”
